ALIEN NOTION

On the first Sunday evening of spring, a family-dominated crowd had converged on the salad bar of a Mission Valley steakhouse. At the back of the room, behind the obstinate, glass-paned doors of the restaurant's banquet facilities, the monthly meeting of San Diego MUFON (Mutual UFO Network-a self-defined "international scientific organization" of "people seriously interested in studying and researching the phenomenon known as Unidentified Flying Objects") was about to start.

The event's scheduled speaker was Dr. David Morehouse, author of Nonlethal Weapons: War Without Death and Psychic Warrior, Inside the CIA's Stargate Program. According to Morehouse's website bio, he had formerly worked with the U.S. Army Intelligence Security Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology "as a top secret Psychic Spy." MUFON-SD had announced that Morehouse would address how non-lethal weapons, using "off-the-shelf technology" might "revolutionize the nature and impact of war."

While a small audience waited for Morehouse, an attendee announced that his phone had inexplicably "gone dead" when, during two separate conversations, he had uttered the words "UFO" or "Roswell." He urged anyone who might experience a similar problem to "write it down, keep it on your person, make a duplicate copy, let me know about it... and we'll go to the phone company and try to get some answers."

Morehouse, possessed of a no-nonsense manner, called the subject of non-lethal weaponry his next "great passion," after the many classes in remote viewing ("a passive intelligence-collection methodology") that he teaches in San Marcos. Among these, Morehouse offers specially tailored remote-viewing courses to cops.

Morehouse explained that support for non-lethal weapon development, which would allow us "to stop belligerents from waging war," had surged right after the end of the Cold War. But since then, a $3.8 trillion industry related to the design, manufacture, sales and training for use of lethal weaponry had "stewed" the non-lethal effort.

For a weapon to be non-lethal, Morehouse said it must be incapable of maiming or otherwise harming an individual, or of destroying the environment. An example of a technology that would fit that bill: aerosol-applied super-polymers "engineered so that they don't attack human tissue."

Morehouse asked the audience to picture a tactical scenario "somewhere off in the Middle East," where an enemy artillery unit is continually firing onto a village. Along come some aircraft, which spray a mist of "microencapsulated pellets" that descends onto the artillery. Pellet contact with anything metal triggers the release of a polymer that rapidly swells in thickness and solidifies into an extremely hard, fiberglass coating. Every weapon thus becomes "combat ineffective" by virtue of being "glued rigid." Any of the substance that should fall on human skin, however, causes no damage to the affected individual.

Another example: anti-traction chemicals added to mud or sand to literally stop tanks in their tracks.

Morehouse talked about a "shroud round," which, when fired at, say, another tank-by, say, an electromagnetic ray gun-would explode microseconds before impact, releasing a microfine "net" that would envelop and disable the tank.

In addition, certain calmative agents, could, when inhaled, put a crowd of people into a deep, temporary sleep.

Morehouse also described "balloon grenades" which, when thrown into, say, the restaurant's banquet room, would explode into huge airbags. "All of us, along with the furniture and everything else, would be pinned against the walls," he said. An unidentified "they" could then come in, pierce the airbags and, as each airbag deflated, "extract us from the room" in "a controlled manner."

"You can bet your boots that, in a lot of areas, [non-lethal weaponry] will be used, but you won't hear a lot about it," he added.

MUFON-SD's Mel Podell stood up and proclaimed that a connection between UFOs and non-lethal weapons did exist. Nuclear arms bases in both the United States and Russia, he claimed, had been "neutralized" during times of reported UFO presence in those areas. Podell pointed to "psychotronic weaponry" that could render UFO witnesses immobile, psychologically affected or controlled by those UFOs.

"These same effects on witnesses to UFO encounters have become the basis of several non-lethal patents issued to a San Diego inventor," Podell maintained.

But Morehouse confessed he didn't share his audience's UFO "passion." Rather, he encouraged those who wanted to support non-lethal weapon development to become involved "at a grassroots level, starting in your own communities." Morehouse proposed that if the citizenry promoted non-lethal weapon use and made police departments "aware of your awareness of it, then they'll employ those technologies."

A police officer, he concluded, would rather "pull out some device that threw foam all over a suspect and held them on the ground stuck to the sidewalk" than draw "his weapon and hope that he wouldn't have to pull the trigger."